Is This Serious Music or Slim-Price Peas? : Shrewd Shoppers Can Cheat Themselves

I think the average person who does not know a lot about music loves to get more for the dollar.

--Susan Beechner,

County Philharmonic Society board

The greatest thing to come out of the consumer-protection movement of the past 3 decades--aside from seat belts, warning labels on cigarettes and child-proof caps for nuclear reactors--is those little tags on grocery store shelves that tell how many cents per ounce you pay for a box of Cheerios or Tide.

Those shelf tags have enabled us to be shrewder shoppers. But I think they also may have spawned a pervasive value consciousness that we sometimes take a little too far once we leave the market. I blame them, in fact, for the far-less-than-capacity turnout for a beautiful recital by cellist Lynn Harrell recently at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

For the 3,000-seat hall, only 1,700 tickets were sold. Some in-the-know types say the problem is that people in our culturally young county aren’t used to buying tickets for classical music that needs only one or two musicians on stage. I have a sneaking suspicion they’re right, that audiences just don’t feel as if they would be getting their money’s worth.

I call it the music-per-dollar factor.

If the Chicago Symphony plays here with its 90 or so members and a ticket costs $30, that breaks down to a cost of 33 cents per musician. A veritable bargain.

But for Harrell, who was accompanied by pianist Brooks Smith, the same formula reveals a cost of $15 per musician--a 3,500% increase! It’s a good thing there were no price-per-measure tags with the ads for his appearance or Harrell might have drawn even fewer listeners.

Not that there’s anything wrong with selling “only” 1,700 tickets to a cello recital--a point that was made by Erich Vollmer, executive director of the Orange County Philharmonic Society, which presented Harrell. That number is almost half again as much as the capacity of the 1,262-seat Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, a popular facility for recitals.

But the place should have been full, as it was last weekend for superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma. But Ma, see, brought along a large supporting cast--the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

It just ain’t fair to the poor guy who’s up there slogging it out alone.

Madison Avenue has brainwashed us into thinking we always have to look for the giant economy-size package.

OK, maybe there is more to watch at orchestra concerts. If your interest in the music dips, you can look to see whether one of the third violinists is bowing in the wrong direction, or whether the timpani player is still awake.

Also, an orchestra can certainly play a lot louder than two guys from Juilliard. So maybe a decibel-per-dollar factor also comes into play.

Actually, when you ask around, there are a lot of reasons why more people prefer large-scale music making.

“It’s more of a struggle to get lost in the music” at a recital, said Wilma Trabur of San Juan Capistrano during intermission at Yo-Yo Ma’s concert.

“I think you have to know a little bit more about music to appreciate a recital,” added her neighbor, Carl Sims, a longtime Philharmonic Society subscriber.

In other words, the aficionado factor.

“For the not particularly musical concert-goer, I think there’s something a little bit scary about the intimacy of a cellist and pianist,” said Burton Karson, professor of music at Cal State Fullerton. Karson is a founder of the Center and founding director of the annual Corona del Mar Baroque Music Festival, which specializes in chamber music.

There is “a fear of being bored, whereas with an orchestra they know there will be a lot of different tones, sounds, timbres, colors and they are likely to be more entertained, if not challenged quite so much.”

Francis Mulato of Laguna Hills, a Philharmonic Society subscriber, said: “To me, (a recital) is a deeper kind of music, more difficult to get enjoyment out of.”

This preference certainly isn’t peculiar to Orange County--everywhere you go, recitals are a harder sell than concerts. “Across the country there is an audience for recitals--and there is an audience here--but that audience is much smaller,” said Thomas R. Kendrick, president of the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Before coming here, Kendrick was at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, where, he said, “a successful recital series . . . would draw 300 to 350 per concert.”

“It’s an uphill battle” in Orange County, Vollmer said, “only because there hasn’t been the product available here.”

In any case, Kendrick and Vollmer say we probably won’t be seeing an increase in the relatively paltry number of recitals at the Center unless a smaller, second theater is built. (After today’s Leontyne Price recital, there isn’t another scheduled until pianist Andre Watts hits town April 25.)

And that’s too bad, because music as delicious as Lynn Harrell made that night often only comes in the small can.